[goodside]

Hi. I work at OkCupid.

I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men.

This does not mean that the site is "better" for women than for men, relative to any other form of heterosexual courtship. It's a deeply ingrained cultural, and perhaps biological, norm that men make proposals and the women evaluate them. If you went to a singles bar, you'd find that all drinks bought for strangers were purchased by men for women.

As others have pointed out, the choice of different cities interferes with what you were trying to demonstrate, though the effect size was so huge it was difficult to not confirm it despite the confounding factor.

[3pt14159]

I think he had a good time doing the experiment, so it wasn't really "trouble". Trouble is when you spend a year and a half performing experiments for data that you need as the foundation of your PhD, only to find them available for free in German off of the University of Hannover's website.

[wtvanhest]

I just started using it after I moved to a new city. I have had some great dates, and even met some friends who introduced me to their friends so I’m certainly not complaining about the site, but I have two observations I would love to have the understanding behind.

1st, what is the purpose of the green/yellow/red dot? To me, if I see a women with a yellow or green dot I rarely if ever contact them. Also, the percentage of women with red dots is ridiculous compared with the other colors. It basically seems like a worthless indicator of anything and may even be harmful since it causes people to select the red over the yellow etc.

As a guy, if I get messages from women and they are someone I may or may not have contacted, I never respond to get my color back up to yellow. I can’t keep it there long, and have to check using a fake profile, but feel like the gamesmanship is worth it.

2nd, why say exactly when someone was online last? This encourages me to not login random times since I don’t want people seeing that I am always checking in. Even if I am bored somewhere, have nothing else to look at, I purposely don’t go to the site to let it sit. You would generate more ad revenue, at least from me if the site said, visited in last 48 hours or whatever.

FYI, for those trying the site, 2 things really surprised me. 1, the photo selection tool, I can’t remember the name, was really useful as it let me pick better photos of myself. 2, focusing on having a profile that was more about stuff I was doing was better than a profile about who I am. (that may be me specific).

[ig1]

You realize for someone to see that you're checking in all the time they'd also have to be checking in all the time and stalking your profile ?

I don't know OKCs reasoning behind it but I can think of a bunch of arguments. For example say you've messaged someone to rearrange a date and you want to make sure they've logged in since you sent it, or say you want to catch them online and want to know the best time, etc.

[wtvanhest]

I’m reacting to my thought process in viewing women’s profiles. If I visit a profile just twice I have a pretty good idea that they are checking it every day etc. If both times I visit they were online within the last 2 hours (extreme example) I know they are checking it a lot.

While that information doesn’t really matter, I noticed that I sort of laugh about it to myself and make assumptions about the person. If I am making assumptions, women are making assumptions and if the environment is as highly competitive as described, you really don’t want anything against you.

[ig1]

How often do you have a woman checking out your profile every day ?

[wtvanhest]

There is no way to know, but before I message someone I usually look at their profile, wait at least a day, then read it carefully before messaging them.

In the beginning I would just message women right away, but after a few dates that I could have avoided I decided to be more careful since there is no reason to go out with someone you know will not work.

[by the way] I saw a comment you posted a few weeks ago and liked it so I went to your old blog imranontech.com and read through a bunch of your articles. Really good stuff.

[ta12121]

1. The dot indicates the likelihood the person would respond. I would imagine it's an attempt to encourage people to try talking to others that are less than perfect, since they are more likely to respond.

2. Because if they haven't been online in 3 months I don't want to waste my time emailing them.

[wtvanhest]

1. I get that, but in practice it doesn't work that way since almost every women is red.

2. That is why it could say... "online in the last 48 hours"

[Bill_Dimm]

I haven't been on OKCupid in years, so this info may be outdated, but they used to display a green/yellow/red dot to indicate whether or not someone usually responds when you initiate contact with them. Most women have red dots because you probably won't get any response from them whatsoever if you send them a message.

[sjs382]

To your whole team: Thanks for an awesome product that changed my life for the better!

[tghw]

Is there any chance of OkTrends coming back any time soon, if ever?

[goodside]

There are no plans to permanently stop doing posts as far as I know. OkCupid's user base has been growing rapidly over the past year, to put it mildly, but we're still only ~30 people so we haven't had much time for the more peripheral aspects of the site. I know there are some things in the works, but I'm not directly involved so I can't really give a time estimate.

[alttab]

I glad we have someone from OKCupid on here. Just want to let you know personally that I tried everything when I moved to a new city. Match, PlentyOfFish, and a billion others I can't remember. I got good at writing profiles.

OKCupid did an auto-match for someone I didn't find during my own searches. I thought I looked at everything. We apparently thought each other were attractive enough, and thats what spawned the initial prod from OKCupid.

The similarities didn't stop there. This was 4 years ago and now I have an amazing wife, the perfect wife. She makes me a better person.

It is fairly easy for me to say I would have never met this woman without OKCupid (the site, and the science that drives it). Your service has literally changed my life permanently, for the better. And you did it without charging me a thing. So thank you, and hopefully you guys keep your spirit and innovation as part of a larger match.com portfolio!

[dr42]

while I am glad you have found someone, I would bet that it had very little to do with okcupid, but rather your emotional availability and confidence. If you could have been cloned and A/B tested, I bet B would have met someone just the same in real life without okcupid.

It's like saying I'm so grateful to Muni for introducing me to my gf because I met her waiting for the bus. The bus had nothing to do with it.

But good luck to both of you, regardless.

[tghw]

That's good to hear, but with the last post being over a year old, it's firmly in dead blog land right now. You guys have a fascinating collection of data available to you, and since (I'm assuming) you'd never release it, your posts are the only view the rest of the world has into it.

If you wouldn't mind, could you poke whoever is in charge of the blog and get them to start assigning some posts. I'm sure your employees would love a short respite from their current work to run some interesting stats.

[dlytle]

I think one advantage of his test is that it's (apparently) independent of an entity with a stake in the outcome.

Based on everything I've seen about OkCupid, there's no shortage of integrity, but independent verification is still valuable.

Also, I'm curious: I've read a couple of articles online proposing different methods for OkCupid handling Mandatory answers to questions. One in particular involves treating Mandatory answers as only negative, so that agreeing with someone about the size of the sun (for example) doesn't mean you're a better match, it just means you're a worse match if you disagree. What are your thoughts on that? (Not the company's thoughts, of course.)

[impendia]

>I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men.

I am curious: Are there any variables which, after you control for them, make this go away or diminish? i.e., high income, feminist leanings, political beliefs, etc. ?

[rmc]

You'll probably get totally different results amoung non-heterosexual people…

[dr42]

no. men are on the whole, put off by sexually aggressive women, so women have evolved to use much more subtle forms of invitation.

The "message" is not the beginning of the story. The women selected her photos and wrote her profile, which was really her way of instating the process.

Basic human behavior is the women presents her availability, men respond with courtship rituals - that vary from culture to culture and the online culture is no different, but the basic pattern is the same.

Women, however, instigate the process with variables like the ones you mention (high income, feminist leanings etc) factored into her photos/profile. This is the same as in real life, for example, going out in SF is selecting for a certain type - you wont find many christian fundamentalist, creationist, poor people hanging out in the Marina. Again the woman has made the first move, but the next step is up to the guys to respond. So think of every okcupid profile as an opening message and you'll be closer to understanding the dynamics of dating.

[jacques_chester]

In legal terms you're suggesting "an offer to treat"; ie an invitation to negotiate. Not binding but providing terms you're willing to work within.

[akoumjian]

I was going to leave a comment that this guy obviously doesn't read the blog. Then I noticed that the Trends blog (blog.okcupid.com) hasn't been updated in well over a year. What happened? It was an incredibly fascinating read.

[klipt]

So I've noticed that facebook now has a feature that tells you that a message has been viewed. Could OkCupid benefit from a feature like that?

[fragmede]

Are you actually offering up an anonymized corpus of your data to play with? Not just because I have some questions I'd like to ask it, but because offering up some data the only way you could actually make that claim.

[dr42]

Absolutely, nothing in this experiment is news to anyone that knows about dating dynamics.

The experiment fails to account for the reason why people are on the site in the first place, it assumes the reasons are gender-agnostic, which is not the case.

Men join okcupid to get laid, sure there are some outliers, (usually the most vocal,) and some of them are genuine, but many claim that wasn't that motivation for reasons easily explained by cognitive dissonance.

Women join okcupid to get attention. Sure, a few are actually looking to find dates, but mostly, as my girlfriend says "okcupid is facebook for attention whores". For her, and any girl that grew up cute, she is used to getting a lot of attention, and this is just the online equivalent of wearing a miniskirt to a club. She loves it when guys spend ages writing creative messages, their fawning just plays right into her need for attention. She also loves the control, having the ability to just ignore someone who has spent so long trying to get her attention. okcupid addresses many human needs, but dating is very likely far down the list, past more involuntary needs.

just because the world has gone digital, doesn't mean human psychology changes. Women have been adorning themselves for attention since we first started painting in caves, and men, well, men are just men, it's why there are nearly 7 billion of us on the planet. there'd be 8B if it wasn't for the xbox.

The psychology of relationships really isn't that hard, it just seems like it when you're in one.

[rubashov]

> perhaps biological, norm that men make proposals and the women evaluate them

I don't think this is quite true. In a bar or club women invite specific men to hit on them with positioning, proximity, and eye contact. She'll steal glances and stand nearby. The solid majority of flirting is subtley initiated by women in the real world and internet dating breaks that.